Influencer marketing refers to the act of building a relationship with influencers based on the values of trust with the goal of activating genuine word of mouth online at a scale that can positively impact your business.
Affiliate marketing takes this one step further with the goal to grow a brand’s revenue by offering their affiliate partner custom offers, discounts and codes to drive sales.
2020 turned out to be a year where influencer collaboration and partnership impact increased by 57%, which means this is the perfect time to revise your strategy and find out what model works best for you and your brand
The key difference between both
Before you start making all sorts of plans for your 2012 marketing efforts it might be worthwhile understanding a bit more about affiliate marketing vs influencer marketing and consider what objectives you are looking to achieve. You can break this down into these 3 categories
- Your Goals: What are you looking to achieve?
- Your audience and what platform they use, what channels are your key demographics
- Your Budget: Do you have funds to spend on influencers or want to see results first
Other points to consider include
Once you have it figured out based on your desired objectives then you can plan which route works best for you. At the end of the day, both marketing approaches work; you can even phase them out or run it all at the same time.
How to find and work with an affiliate partner
There isn’t just one way to find affiliates. You can go the traditional way and search google or work with partner platforms to help you find them, or you can reach out to your community and communicate that you would like to reward them for promoting you like Honest Co. for example.
One thing you should note is most affiliates tend to be influencers or content publishers who are starting out and the follower count and activity are relatively between their follower count are anywhere between 2K to 30K. Of course the follower count isn’t the only thing you should focus on when looking for partners., you should consider their engagement, content they create and demographics they reach. However it’s the ones who are starting out that are usually more open to working in this model. Of course it’s always helpful if there is a high affinity between your brand/product and the content creator which means this would be the perfect partnership between you both.
The models of affiliate marketing
In order to track how well your partnership is going, then there are few tracking metrics which can be used to incentivise your collaboration.
- The volume of Sales: This is simply a measure of just how effective your affiliate partner is at driving sales.
- Website Traffic: A way to measure how many clicks or traffic is being driven to your website through a unique link posted by your affiliate partner.
- Order Value: If the affiliates base audience is purchasing products or/ and products with a higher value.
Most importantly, it’s important to keep in mind that whether you decide on influencer or affiliate marketing or both, you recognize that it all boils down to a partnership based on relationship and value ad between the brand and the partner.
We at S3cubed can help you figure out what works best for you. Get in touch!
